


the sammy stevens show

by and_hera



Series: hold me fast [2]
Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Reminiscing, oh to be lily wright watching your brother and best friend make eyes at each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:35:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26970757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/and_hera/pseuds/and_hera
Summary: “Yeah?” Emily raises an eyebrow. “Is he handsome?”Sammy gives her a look. She returns it, pushing her glasses up her nose. He sighs dramatically. “Yeah,” Sammy says. “He’s handsome.”“Aww,” Emily cooes, and Sammy smacks her arm. “That checks, though. I mean, if he looks like Lily, he’s destined to be attractive.”“Don’t let Ben hear you say that,” Sammy teases.or, the one in which Sammy and Emily go on an adventure (like, a whole twenty miles outside of King Falls).
Relationships: Ben Arnold/Emily Potter, Emily Potter & Sammy Stevens, Sammy Stevens/Jack Wright
Series: hold me fast [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1956505
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	the sammy stevens show

**Author's Note:**

> hellooooo part 2!  
> i'm always a sucker for sammy and emily friendship, so i hope you all are too! please enjoy <3

The last time Sammy was at this storage unit, it was April 30, 2015. A few hours before he drove into King Falls, running late for his first night. He dropped off everything that was Jack’s and everything he could stand to not live with, and then kept driving. That was that. He hasn’t been back since.

He doesn’t remember a book like Death by Damnation being in there. Sammy feels like he would have noticed something as… _off_ as that book is. But those months while Jack was leaving and those months after he was gone are a blur to him still, so he can’t be sure.

He’s glad Emily’s with him, and not Ben or Lily. He loves Ben, he does, Ben’s like his little brother, and that’s why Sammy doesn’t want him to see what he becomes when he sees all of these things again. And so many of the things in this storage unit either belong to Lily or include her, and with everything, Sammy doesn’t want to have to go through it all again.

He’s a coward. He knows it. Emily smiles at him from the passenger seat. Sammy thinks that Emily might know a thing or two about hiding. He smiles back, and if it holds a little less warmth than Emily’s does, she doesn’t mention it.

“What are we hoping to find?” she asks, breaking the silence for the first time. It hasn’t been an uncomfortable silence, though. Just nice. “What do you think is there?”

Sammy shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, he had notebooks. He had a lot of notebooks, and I couldn’t- I didn’t go through them all.”

Emily hums. “So when you and Lily say he’s like Ben-”

“Yeah,” Sammy says. “It was like a punch in the face the first time he brought one to the station.”

“I’m sorry,” Emily says.

“Not your fault,” Sammy replies.

Emily says, “when we get Jack back- no, don’t make that noise, _when_ we get Jack back, do you think he and Ben will love each other or try to kill each other?”

Sammy laughs halfheartedly. “They’ll probably be best friends,” he admits. “They’re similar but they’re not the same. It’ll be funny seeing them together, though. Jack’s taller than I am, and Ben is- well, Ben.”

Emily laughs at that. “I can’t wait to meet him,” she says. “For all your talk of Jack, I don’t even know what the guy looks like.”

“Like Lily,” Sammy says immediately. “No one would look at them and not know that they’re siblings. They have the same eyes, same mouth.”

“Yeah?” Emily raises an eyebrow. “Is he handsome?”

Sammy gives her a look. She returns it, pushing her glasses up her nose. He sighs dramatically. “Yeah,” Sammy says. “He’s handsome.”

“Aww,” Emily cooes, and Sammy smacks her arm. “That checks, though. I mean, if he looks like Lily, he’s destined to be attractive.”

“Don’t let Ben hear you say that,” Sammy teases.

“How far away is the storage unit?” Emily asks.

Sammy looks at the clock in his car. They’ve been driving for about twenty minutes. “Maybe another hour,” he says. “Doesn’t look like there’s much traffic, though, so probably shorter.”

“Haven’t been many cars around,” Emily points out.

Sammy says, “no, there haven’t,” and then he thinks about it. “Do you know why?” he asks.

Emily blinks, and then she closes her eyes. “There are cars farther out,” she says slowly, and Sammy is trying to keep his eyes on the road as he merges onto the highway but he can see a steady light growing brighter and brighter to his right. “There are cars farther out, but there aren’t any around King Falls. No one’s coming here anymore, everyone’s being directed away from the town, it’s like, it’s like a barrier surrounding it. And- and there are houses, and there are people in the houses, and they’re scared and they don’t know if they’re actually people or if they’re just shadows of them-”

“Emily!” Sammy snaps, and she gasps. He looks over, and the light is gone from her eyes. Her nose is bleeding, so he opens the compartment between them and hands her a tissue. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t- I don’t want to push you, if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I don’t want to hurt you-”

“I’m fine, Sammy,” Emily says, and she takes a deep breath. “Yeah. I’m okay. Just a little shaken- there’s a lot going on, right now.”

“I gathered,” Sammy says wryly. “What- what is it like?”

Emily sniffs, throwing her bloodied tissue into the trash bag. “What’s what like?”

Sammy gestures with his hand. “Seeing things. Eyes glowing. Hands glowing. I don’t know. So far, you’re the only one of us who’s done anything particularly… out of the ordinary.”

Emily shrugs. “I don’t know how to describe it,” she says slowly. “It’s like… it’s like the dreams I had. The ones of the white room, and the red eyes. It’s like that, but I’m awake, and it’s all _real_. It’s like the memories I got back while Greg was still- you know, and they didn’t make _any_ sense, so I just thought it was a scary dream.”

“Seems like you can describe it pretty well,” Sammy replies. She laughs a little. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It sounds terrifying.”

Emily punches his arm lightly. “Nothing you did,” she says, “and don’t go feeling bad for me yet. We’ve all got roles in this goddamn prophecy. I’m sure you’ll get a good taste for scary, too.”

Sammy shudders. “I sure hope not.”

“Me too, but Mr. Sammy “Protector” Stevens, I doubt you’ll be getting out of this without any evil encounters.”

“Hey, well, I like _protector_ a lot better than _shotgun_ , so I’ll take it. At least this trauma isn’t induced by sexism and homophobia.”

Emily laughs, a real one this time, and Sammy smiles. “Should I put on the radio?” she asks. “I mean, it’s no Sammy and Ben Show.”

“I’m sure it’s better than the Sammy and Ben Show,” Sammy says under his breath. “At the very least, I bet they have a working bleeper.”

“It adds to the charm of the show!” Emily protests, but she turns the radio on anyway, and two people are chatting about the weather and some article about the president. It’s boring, but in a way that allows them to have a comfortable silence for the rest of the way up, sans the few times Sammy makes fun of an awkward transition or when Emily says that Ben is a _much_ better producer than whoever _this guy_ is.

It’s nice. Sammy thinks that he should have taken Emily more seriously a lot earlier. Of course, he’ll never be on Ben’s level, but he does love Emily, too. He loves them all, his little brother and two sisters.

God, he’s gotten sappy. Jack will never stop making fun of him once he’s back.

When they eventually reach the storage unit, Sammy pulls into a spot and takes the keys out of the ignition. Emily looks at him expectantly. He takes a deep breath and gets out of the car.

It’s unit 068, and Sammy hears a click and a whirr from beside him so he turns before pulling the key out of his pocket. Emily’s standing there, rolling up on her toes and then back on her heels over and over, a tape recorder in her hand. “What?” she says. “Benny would want us to.”

“Oh, well, if Ben wants us to,” Sammy replies, and she rolls her eyes. He grabs the key and puts into the lock, pulling the door up.

It’s a mess, because he was in a hurry when he put everything in there. It’s mostly full of boxes that are half-full or boxes that are overflowing- Jack was always the one who packed when they traveled- and there’s a couch propped against a wall. Calling it a couch is generous, to be honest. Sammy doesn’t know how they both fit on it.

Emily whistles. “That’s a lot of boxes,” she says.

“Yeah,” Sammy says. “I think- I think most of the stuff we’re looking for will be in one specific box, because I think I had most of his notebooks that I didn’t think were, well, coherent, in one place.”

“Can’t hurt to go through the rest, though,” Emily replies. Sammy raises an eyebrow. She smiles. 

“I guess it can’t,” Sammy concedes, and she smiles wider, and puts the recorder on the ground before stepping into the compartment to grab a box off the top. 

This box has pictures. A lot of them. There’s a few broken pieces of glass from frames at the bottom, and Emily curses when she almost cuts her finger on one. The pictures are mostly Sammy, Jack, and Lily, with a few others of friends or coworkers over the years. Emily pauses on one that has the three of them sitting in a radio station, Jack’s finger on the bleeper from where he’s sitting at the board, Sammy and Lily facing each other on either side of the table. They’re all smiling. Sammy and Jack are staring at each other.

It's a life. The Sammy Stevens Show.

“I always forget your hair used to be short,” Emily comments, and it’s just enough to snap Sammy out of… whatever feeling he’s experiencing that he laughs. “You know, for all that I’ve heard his voice, I think this is the first time I’ve seen his face.”

Jack, staring at the camera, like he noticed first that they were being captured in a photo, grinning. They’re young in this, probably just out of college, but Jack’s eyes never lost the glint of excitement.

“Yeah, well,” Sammy says, “was I right?”

“Hm?”

“Was I right?” He points at the picture, taps Jack’s face. “ _Is_ he handsome?”

Emily laughs. She studies his face for a moment. “Yeah,” she says. “I think so.”

Sammy nods. He grabs another box.

* * *

A tape. It says, _For S, Love J_. Emily runs her fingers over it, and Sammy has to stop himself from grabbing it from her hands. He’s pretty sure that in another box, there’s an almost identical one, but the initials are swapped. They made each other mixtapes when they were twenty-four. It was their six month anniversary. They tried to surprise each other, but they got the same gift, so it was more funny than anything.

Emily doesn’t know any of that, so she puts the tape down on a box full of sheets like it’s nothing.

A pad of sticky notes. In the bottom right corner, if you flip the pages, there’s a little character who looks like Sammy opening his mouth in surprise and then disappearing with a little “BOOM” and explosion. Sammy remembers that Lily doodled it during a boring morning a year after college. Jack had laughed and tried to make one of her own, quickly giving up before it was halfway done. 

Sammy pockets it.

Another picture, from the same box. Sammy, Jack, and Lily went to Disney World to celebrate graduating college. Sammy and Jack are kissing. Sammy remembers the photo, because Lily pressured them into taking it, said _you’ll regret this if you don’t take it, dumbasses_ and _no one here knows you, it’s okay, really_. So Lily took it on her shitty camera that she brought, and they printed it out. It’s the only picture Sammy had that shows they were in a relationship. He almost forgot about it.

Emily gasps when she sees it, smiles wide. “This is adorable,” she says.

Sammy shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “Better times, I guess.”

A notebook. Emily finds it first. It has a light blue cover. The handwriting in it is messy and big and loopy, all the letters connected. Timestamps, dates, names of old businesses that are probably closed down by now.

“Was this from your show?” Emily asks.

“Yeah,” Sammy answers.

“He produced,” Emily says. This isn’t a question. Sammy nods anyway. “Was he as good of a producer as Ben is?”

Sammy says, “that’s an unfair question. I think I have a bit of a bias.”

“Towards who?”

Sammy thinks about it, and then he shrugs. “I guess you’re right,” he says. “I don’t know if I can say that Mr. Cronkite, Brokaw, Ben Arnold is better than Jack, but I can’t say he’s worse, either.”

“Producer and co-host,” Emily muses. “No wonder Lily hated Ben when she first met him.”

“I don’t think she ever hated him,” Sammy says. “Not really. She just- she thought I had replaced him, I think. And Jack Wright isn’t someone you replace.”

Emily nods. That’s the thing about Emily- she’s probably one of the brightest people Sammy’s known, and she _gets_ people. She knows how to react to things. If Lily had been with him, they would either be yelling or crying or both. If Ben had been with him, Sammy doesn’t know what would have happened, because Ben loves Jack already and he hasn’t even met him.

Emily is quietly sad, and she is quietly supportive, and Sammy loves her for it. Eventually she’s going to have to be more than quiet and nice, Sammy knows that, but right now, he’s grateful for it.

“Here,” he says. “If you found a notebook, the rest of the box probably has the rest. If there’s something that’s going to help us, it’ll be in there.”

Emily grabs the box and puts it on the floor, and sits down criss cross right beside it. Sammy joins her, leaning against a pile of boxes. She hands him a notebook, and takes one of her own. They both start to read.

Sammy has one that’s another show notebook, from 1090 AM, when they were only a year from leaving Lily behind. There are doodles scribbled in the margins. There are a few times where his own handwriting makes an appearance, making edits on days Jack might have been sick or simply forgotten about it, caught up on Youtube or at the library or what have you. Every now and then, Lily would doodle something into the margins to annoy them both.

“There isn’t going to be much in this one,” he says at the same time that Emily says, “Jesus, he really was into this stuff, wasn’t he?”

“You first,” Sammy says.

Emily flips through the notebook, start to finish, pages flying by her thumb. “I think I saw passages of _Death by Damnation_ , or at least, something similar. Very dark looking stuff. I don’t know how he translated on his own, but-”

“He was- he’s smart,” Sammy says. “Really fucking bright. When he got into something, nothing was getting lost in translation. Not on his watch.”

Emily hums. She turns to a random page. “Like, he wrote here, ‘a dark light shines brighter than the dawn / the great flood of darkness / the Protector carries a shield’- it just keeps going.”

“Protector,” Sammy says. “Would that be me?”

Emily shrugs. “I guess.”

“And do we think this is from DBD?”

Emily shrugs again. “I can’t be sure. I mean, we had what, ten pages left to translate? That’s ten pages we have no idea about.”

Sammy closes the notebook in his hands. “Probably best to take that one with us, then?”

“Probably.”

* * *

They go through the notebooks. There aren’t many of substance. Most are old show notebooks, or the time Jack wanted to write out some kind of novel and then gave up after fifteen pages. Emily laughed at that one. She read the whole thing. “When we get him back, we should make him continue it,” she said to Sammy. 

He knows it’s a trap to get him to admit that Jack will come back. He let himself fall for it anyway, though. “Yeah,” he replied. “We should.”

There were a few, though. The first one Emily found, the third Sammy picked up, and the fourth Emily opened. They had- they had something, all right. Bits of DBD that they remembered. Bits of something that seemed like DBD, but they couldn’t really be sure. Sammy put them all in his backpack.

“Alright,” Emily says, once they’d repacked most of the boxes. “Anything else you need?”

Sammy shakes his head. “No, I’m okay,” he says. “Most ghosts should stay ghosts.”

“I’m taking this picture for myself, then,” Emily says, holding up the one of him and Jack and Lily in the station. “Not for you. Not at all.” She winks.

“Em, if you wink, it really ruins the effect-”

She waves him off, and she slips the picture in her wallet. “Is that it, then?” she asks.

“I guess,” Sammy replies.

Emily nods at him, and then turns to the storage unit. She reaches up and pulls it down. She knocks twice on the metal door, as if saying goodbye.

“Okay,” she says. “Do you want me to drive back? I know my legs always get sore from driving too long- oh, shit.” 

Sammy wasn’t looking at her before, but he looks up, and her fingertips are glowing all sorts of colors. Rainbow lights, he thinks for a split second, before pushing the thought away. “What the hell?” he says.

“Sammy,” Emily says slowly, “I think- I think something is coming.”

“Something’s _coming_?” Sammy asks. “We’re not even in the city, Emily-”

“Well, I think the two of us draw things like this to us, Sammy,” she snaps. “God, my head. Get in the car. You’re driving, I don’t think I can.”

Sammy opens the driver’s side door and he sits down in the seat and he puts the keys in the ignition. And then he turns to make sure Emily’s in the car, and someone is sitting in the passenger seat, definitely, but-

“Hey, Sammy,” Jack Wright says. His eyes are entirely black. “I’ve missed you.”

**Author's Note:**

> tune in next week (hopefully!) for whatever shit ben and lily get into back in king falls and NOT an explanation for... _that._ yell at me on twitter @lcvelaces, and thanks for reading!


End file.
